Computer tracking of billiard balls

The folks at the London-based startup GoCardless have a pool table at their office. Being the techies they are, they decided to build a system that automatically scores games. The results, while not fully complete, are still pretty impressive for something whipped up during a 48 hour hackathon.

The automated score keeper uses a webcam duct taped to the ceiling right above the center of the pool table, The balls – red and yellow balls replace the rainbow of solids and stripes to make things easier – are found using OpenCV.

This build isn’t quite finished yet. The people at GoCardless are looking to improve the accuracy of their setup by using a camera with a higher frame rate and possibly moving on to physics simulation to predict where the balls should be. If these guys get the time, they could add something like augmented reality pool table to improve shot accuracy.

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10 thoughts on “Computer tracking of billiard balls”

Did something similar for a third year engineering course: http://goo.gl/l1SWd . OpenCV is a hell of a lot of fun. I also suspect they could have been able to get reasonable results with the rainbow balls, although perhaps not as accurate.

We actually started out with a set of spotted and striped balls as we previously had an American table. We replaced them with a set of red and yellow balls on the day partly to make the tracking easier, and partly to be better Brits ;)

We actually started out with a set of spotted and striped balls as we previously had an American table. We replaced them with a set of red and yellow balls on the day partly to make the tracking easier, and partly so we felt like ‘proper’ Brits ;)